Tony Stewart ready for Brickyard

Friday

Jul 27, 2007 at 12:01 AMJul 27, 2007 at 1:32 PM

CHICAGO – Preview of Brickyard 400

By Tim Cronin

It was less than an hour after Tony Stewart raced to the checkered flag at Chicagoland Speedway a fortnight ago, and, while he was celebrating, he was also looking ahead.
Prodded by reporters, he couldn’t help himself. After all, after the last bye week of the season, one of the biggest races of the year was next: the Brickyard 400.
The annual visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has grown to be the second-most-heralded race in NASCAR’s realm, second only to the Daytona 500, even though the 99-year-old Indy track is torturously narrow for stock cars. It’s the aura of Indy the drivers have sensed since the 1994 inaugural, and nobody gets the feeling more than Stewart, a native Hoosier.
Thus, when Greg Zipadelli, Stewart’s crew chief, said of the Brickyard after the race in Joliet, “It’s just another race track,” Stewart turned to the left and said, “What!?”
Not quite. Stewart won the Brickyard 400 in 2005 and found it a career-defining moment -- not bad for a guy who has won series championships in both NASCAR and the Indy Racing League.
“This has been everything I’ve ever wanted or ever dreamed of,” Stewart said when he won at Indy two years ago.
Jeff Gordon knows of what Stewart speaks, having won the Brickyard four times, including the inaugural. Gordon, in his second full season in 1994, had won the World 600 in the spring, but victory at Indy put the transplanted Hoosier into the first rank of stock-car drivers.
“You love the facility,” Gordon said of the grandstands that never seem to end. “But the track is awfully hard to drive.”
That may be why the list of winners in the first 13 races is filled with quality. Gordon’s four titles lead the way, but the list includes Dale Earnhardt, Dale Jarrett, Bill Elliott and Bobby Labonte.
It’s also a complicated race, largely because the track is so difficult to pass on. Stewart and Zipadelli went back and forth on the radio late in the 2005 race, the first with Allstate’s moniker attached, when Stewart was trailing only Kasey Kahne. They mulled making a pit stop during a yellow flag and decided to gamble there was enough gas to finish. There was, and Stewart passed Kahne on the restart lap and went on to win.
Had Stewart pitted, he might have finished 30th.
In 1997, Ricky Rudd was in the same situation, on the cusp of running out of fuel. He stayed out, other contenders had to pit, and he won the race.
In contrast, Earnhardt laid in the weeds in the second 400, which was delayed several hours by the remnants of a hurricane. But when he took the lead at the dinner hour with 28 laps remaining, he held on to it like it was his birthright.
While the racing is rarely side by side, the competition is intense. Until this year, NASCAR always scheduled optional practice days at the Speedway, and everyone turned out. While the set-up used for Pocono is where teams generally start with their chassis, cars are built specifically for Indianapolis.
“Everybody brings the best possible car, the best possible motor, everything they can possibly bring to be competitive,” driver Elliott Sadler said. “We have been talking about Indy a lot the past month trying to get ready for the race.”
So it goes up and down the garages in Gasoline Alley, where this weekend the revamped Dale Earnhardt Inc. team, newly merged with Ginn Racing, unveils a four-car lineup driven by Dale Earnhardt Jr., Mark Martin, Martin Truex Jr. and Paul Menard, with Earnhardt Jr. leaving at the end of the season for Hendrick Motorsports.
Additionally, Robert Yates is making official today the merger of his team with Newman-Haas-Lanigan, the Lincolnshire-based Champ Car team. Whether the combined group will field a Champ Car team in 2008 should be part of today’s announcement.
The corporate dealing will hardly detract from the race. Instead, it feeds the soap opera that is NASCAR off the track. And on the track, the winner of the 14th Brickyard 400 will likely have a wheel up on the Nextel Cup title. Jimmie Johnson, last year’s Brickyard winner, was the sixth Indy champ to go on to capture the season crown as well, all the “doubles” happening in the last decade.
“I think it’s more the high you ride after winning a major event,” Johnson said. “You win the Daytona 500, that team is on Cloud 9 for a while. The All-Star, same thing. Brickyard, same thing. With the Brickyard being as late as it is in the season, the momentum and confidence it brings can help carry you into the Chase and to the championship.”
More racing coverage is at www.dailysouthtown.com/sports.